Cross Domain Form POSTing

Question

I've seen articles and posts all over (including SO) on this topic, and the prevailing commentary is that same-origin policy prevents a form POST across domains. The only place I've seen someone suggest that same-origin policy does not apply to form posts, is here.

I'd like to have an answer from a more "official" or formal source. For example, does anyone know the RFC that addresses how same-origin does or does not affect a form POST?

clarification: I am not asking if a GET or POST can be constructed and sent to any domain. I am asking:

1. if Chrome, IE, or Firefox will allow content from domain 'Y' to send a POST to domain 'X'
2. if the server receiving the POST will actually see any form values at all. I say this because the majority of online discussion records testers saying the server received the post, but the form values were all empty / stripped out.
3. What official document (i.e. RFC) explains what the expected behavior is (regardless of what the browsers have currently implemented).

Incidentally, if same-origin does not affect form POSTs - then it makes it somewhat more obvious of why anti-forgery tokens are necessary. I say "somewhat" because it seems too easy to believe that an attacker could simply issue an HTTP GET to retrieve a form containing the anti-forgery token, and then make an illicit POST which contains that same token. Comments?

Answer 1

Same origin policy has nothing to do with sending request to another url (different protocol or domain or port).

It is all about restricting access to (reading) response data from another url. So JavaScript code within a page can post to arbitrary domain or submit forms within that page to anywhere (unless the form is in an iframe with different url).

But what makes these POST requests inefficient is that these requests lack antiforgery tokens, so are ignored by the other url. Moreover, if the JavaScript tries to get that security tokens, by sending AJAX request to the victim url, it is prevented to access that data by Same Origin Policy.

A good example: here

And a good documentation from Mozilla: here

Answer 2

The same origin policy is applicable only for browser side programming languages. So if you try to post to a different server than the origin server using JavaScript, then the same origin policy comes into play but if you post directly from the form i.e. the action points to a different server like:

<form action="http://someotherserver.com">

and there is no javascript involved in posting the form, then the same origin policy is not applicable.

See wikipedia for more information

Answer 3

It is possible to build an arbitrary GET or POST request and send it to any server accessible to a victims browser. This includes devices on your local network, such as Printers and Routers.

There are many ways of building a CSRF exploit. A simple POST based CSRF attack can be sent using .submit() method. More complex attacks, such as cross-site file upload CSRF attacks will exploit CORS use of the xhr.withCredentals behavior.

CSRF does not violate the Same-Origin Policy For JavaScript because the SOP is concerned with JavaScript reading the server's response to a clients request. CSRF attacks don't care about the response, they care about a side-effect, or state change produced by the request, such as adding an administrative user or executing arbitrary code on the server.

Make sure your requests are protected using one of the methods described in the OWASP CSRF Prevention Cheat Sheet. For more information about CSRF consult the OWASP page on CSRF.